Bombay Dreams of Dead Detroit
Jeff Mills too abstract for a cold night at Far Out Left Festival, Mumbai
Winter in Bombay is rarely 'cold'. 'Cold' is a word better suited to describe icy, blue, frozen landscapes, inhospitable to humans. As deployed by critic Adam Harper1, 'cold' can also describe today's style of (techno-)futurism, which is a century-old aesthetic movement that romances accelerating technological change, post-humanism and radical, violent progress. Coldness, not only in the sounds and colours of digital and machinic textures, but reflecting the experience of a particular social being. Coldness describes the uncaring, ruthless world beyond the human; coldness is the calculative and rationalistic logic of neoliberal capital; coldness is communicative systems in modernity at-large that reduce humans to data traffic for profit and control. Techno music has historically galvanised this imagination, as a critical and reflective soundtrack to frigid, alien and dystopian worlds of the near future. Techno is, above all, inhuman, as originally distinct from the warm, organic, humanness of house. But techno is at its best when it courses through warm bodies sharing intimate spaces, pulsating to synthetic rhythms, journeying as one.
One origin of this cold, hostile sci-fi landscape and its praxis as a mode for social solidarity is in the techno of post-industrial Afro-futurism in Detroit. In the spirit of rebellion following the racialised social collapse, urban disintegration and economic recessions of the Regan-Thatcher eras, the Detroit techno movement was represented by collectives such as Underground Resistance. UR, formed in 1989, was militantly anti-establishment, anti-corporate and rejected the commercialization of techno and consumer hedonism in dance music. They also actively resisted celebrity culture, favouring liberation through anonymity behind balaclavas over the entrepreneurial self-narrativising that is ubiquitous today. On its website, UR offers a polemic: “We urge you to join the resistance and help us combat the mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the inhabitants of Earth. This programming is stagnating the minds of the people, building a wall between races and preventing world peace. It is this wall we are going to smash.”
The above call to arms reads more like an obituary today. More than thirty years on, Jeff Mills, co-founder of UR, has visited India for the first time for Far Out Left Festival on a brisk evening in Bombay (and Goa, the day after). If minimal Detroit techno can be called a critical reflection of a dystopian world-to-come, then at Far Out Left it has proved to be its realisation.
Cold, bored, detached - these are words to describe an audience that swayed indifferently to music that was once potentially revolutionary. It is difficult to point fingers, but not impossible. Poor planning of the outdoor dancefloor meant an uncomfortable fight for personal space. Muddy sound meant that the boom of Mills' 909 was suffocating for all except those right below the stage. The glare from alcohol branding and security staff lining the sides of the floor served as reminders that one could never really escape the coercive gaze of industry. Perhaps it was that Mills' ironic celebrity status had been milked too much to maximise footfall, meaning a set better suited for a 2am closer was played at 8pm. Or perhaps it was simply that this particular brand of minimal Detroit techno just does not resonate with the Indian palette, which was better elevated by Marcel Dettmann's slick, contemporary and energetic set the previous night, or by local B2b duo Heemay and Soo Bombay's warm, fuzzy crowd-pleasers an hour later.
In the media promo leading up to the event, Amaan Khan for The Wild City2 spoke to Mills about his artistic approach, with the article's opening line quoting his opinion on his legacy as something he cannot "really direct or participate in". And yet, it was his legacy and repute that packed the outdoor stage at the Todi Mills alley. But even his sanitized legacy did not run deep. If anyone hung their hopes on the popular reception of Mills' track 'The Bells' , they must havebeen disappointed. Instead of being a grand fulcrum for the night, the track would elicit little response except from those already familiar few who could only raise their phones to capture the moment as an accolade for the #iwasthere economy.
Mills' tacit surrender of his legacy is doubly convenient- it disconnects minimal Detroit from its once political content, while allowing for its re-territorialisation from urban African-American ghettos and into clubs in Mumbai. Mills wrote to TWC that "having strong visions about the future isn’t privy to any particular country or city so, it was just a matter of coincidence. In this respect, no place on Earth is distant or remote." Could it be that Mills is forced to rationalise the dilution of local histories and futures in order to mint an exchangeable currency of counterculture? After all, it is only when "no place on Earth is distant or remote" from the forces of cultural globalisation, that we can conceive of a situation where elite Bombay youths enjoy music from a group that was once associated with the Black Panthers, a movement which inspired the Dalit Panthers, whose erstwhile crosshairs were set firmly on the caste and class hegemonies atop which we still sit.
Even beyond the (de)political, the atmosphere at Todi was not transcendental- in fact it never got off the ground. As quoted in TWC's article, Mills considers some DJ sets as a "non-verbal story about ‘The Fantastic’, ‘The Amazing’ or [...] ‘The Unbelievable’". This story is "made in a manner with seriousness"; his 'seriousness' might mean he is inward-looking, far away, and isolated from the audience. This was visibly confirmed at the outside stage at Far Out Left- if Mills was away approaching fantastical, unbelievable alien worlds, then he did not bring us along on the journey. Instead, our minds were elsewhere, too - on when our drug dealer would arrive, on exorbitant bar prices, on whether we should go back to Toit for a bit.
Mills' set at Far Out Left makes one appreciate the sombre irony of the journey of (Afro-)techno-futurism from radical counterculture into the commercial marketplace of authenticity. The coldness of Detroit techno was once critical, piercing and eerie; now the cold is in the zombified flesh of bodies moving to it without purpose, without adventure, without empathy. The radical futures imagined in Detroit have been long abandoned, today preserved as vestigial ghosts, kept on ice and brought out with branded vodka and cocaine. In an experimental piece titled 'Dead Detroit Lies Dreaming', Benjamin Noys3 writes that "Detroit is now confined to the past, but as an image of the future, as a threat, to the failure to embrace the ‘progress’ and ‘development’ that remains the capitalist promise, no matter how tattered and frayed." Noys suspects that Detroit techno as an ageing form is now obsolete, frozen in form , having reached its limits: "the futures sketched by Detroit techno never arrived. They remain as encoded ‘alien’ messages from a future that did not take place." Instead today this dystopian Detroit has been cryogenised like Lenin in Moscow for our nostalgia fetish: "Detroit may not be dead, but the corpse has already been consumed."
Harper, Adam 2014, January 9. Pattern Recognition Vol. 9: Cold Forecast. Telekom ElectronicBeats. https://www.electronicbeats.net/pattern-recognition-vol-9-cold-forecast/.
Khan, Amaan 2024. ‘The Atmosphere That We All Create Together’: Jeff Mills On His Legacy, DJ-ing As Non-Verbal Storytelling & More. https://www.thewildcity.com/features/20552-the-atmosphere-that-we-all-create-together-jeff-mills-on-his-legacy-dj-ing-as-non-verbal-storytelling-more.
Noys, Benjamin 2017. Dead Detroit Lies Dreaming: Techno (Anti-) Accelerationism. . https://non.copyriot.com/dead-detroit-lies-dreaming-techno-anti-accelerationism/
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